Spatial Distribution and Coverage of Urban Green Spaces: Public Parks in Pune

Abstract. With the rapid urbanisation, Green Spaces (GS) are shrinking steeply in urban areas. Parks not only provide green spaces in an urban area, but play a pivotal role in the life of individuals. Apart from being the lungs of the city, they help to reduce the effect of urban heat islands. The current study aims at mapping all public parks sourced and integrated from Open Street Map, Google Earth and Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) database in PMC using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). As per the integrated database, there are 216 public parks in the PMC area. We have analysed the spatial distribution and coverage of green spaces in the PMC. The spatial distribution reveals that the public parks are located in all 15 administrative wards of Pune. However, the analysis indicates a clustered pattern; most of the parks are concentrated in the central part of the city and as the city limits expand, there is a noticeable drop in the coverage of public parks. Cluster boundaries of the existing public parks collectively indicate that many residential areas of PMC are deprived of this GS. In the future, it will be useful to study the existing infrastructure and the usage of existing public parks. Also, an additional important aspect is studying the proximity and access to GS from densely packed informal settlements in the PMC area.